Cat Killing Coyotes: The First Sentence

Now that we're almost into March and the release of the book is fast approaching, I suppose it is time for me to start the promo, pump up, pimping posts again.

So here we go...first sentence of The Foul Mouth and the Cat Killing Coyotes:

There are days when I wake up in the morning and I just want to kill someone.

Release date is still moving around, think early April at the latest!

Foul Mouth Second Drafts

All writers have different methods to get to the end of the road.  For me, the second draft is all about readying the novel for the rest of the process.  It's about coming back to the work with fresh eyes after a break, looking at it objectively, marking the parts where there can be additions, marking the parts that need rewrites, and removing the junk a first draft will always have.

1. Reverse Readthrough - I don't write Foul Mouth books chapter to chapter.  I write the "school" story first, then the "shop" story, and only mix them later.  When I start editing I put the emphasis backwards, starting with "shop" then going through "school", to try to balance the focus.  Usually this readthrough has some typos fixes, the occasional inspirational or clarifying sentence, but nothing large or earth-shattering.
2. Passivity - probably the most important part of editing, this is a word by word search of certain phrases that hold back and create a flat boring read.  I'm looking for "was", "wasn't", "weren't", "were".
3. Words That Suck - also a word by word search but here it's just my personal pet peeves, the words that the writing mind uses as a crutch but the editing mind should nix.  I don't like "thing", "obvious(ly)", "sudden(ly)", "because", "no doubt", "well", "stare", "smile", "mumble", etc.
4. "That" Edit - one word.  Often worthless and unneeded, get it out of there.
5.   Character Edit - For "Fanged Lady" this was focused on Annie B, only her scenes, trying to focus on her dialogue and focus on the scenes from her point of view.  For "Cat Killing Coyotes" it will be T-Bone.
6. Chapter-By-Chapter Edit - The first time I get to read the novel as the reader would, chapter to chapter, switching from "school" to "shop".  Here's where I mark addition places and rewrites for the third draft, probably more typo fixes too.

Foul Mouth 2's First Draft is Done

Talk about a weight off my shoulders.  Of course I had BETROTHAL even before I got around to FOUL MOUTH, so it's not strictly the sophomore jinx, but this was a tough one.  Mostly because so much of what's going on is set up work for the later novels in the series and the contained plots keep blowing up in our hero's face.  How does one write a novel about mistakes and failure without the novel itself becoming a failure?  It's a conundrum, but one I think solved.  There's a lot of great scenes in this one.  Maybe thee outright funniest scene I've written so far in my writing career.

Next up will be three to four months of editing.  Maybe one rewrite on a chapter.  Nothing huge.  Which means...May?  I guess.  Hard to have a firm release date as an Indie.

The Foul Mouth and the Cat Killing Coyotes, coming soon to a Kindle near you.

Christmas is Cancelled

Okay, maybe not Christmas, but I am officially considering BETROTHAL 2 to be shelved.  I'd never actually planned for the "series" to be anything but the first book.  It was developed as a simple funny book that would be easy for me to write and finish, since I'd yet to complete one at that point.  It's fine for what it is, but...I don't read humor/romcom/lad lit.  It's not my thing.  I don't 'get' it.  It's hard to sell it.  It's hard to understand what it's fans are after and expect.

Fantasy is my thing.  Sci-Fi is my thing.  Creating crazy ass worlds, that's my thing.  BETROTHAL was meant to be a one off and forgotten, probably never published if the Indie boom hadn't happened when it did.

So why did I even bother to try to write a sequel?  Most my family.  I got so much "when's the next one coming out?" and "what happens next?" and serious whining over a sequel that I caved and thought I could at least try.

But my heart just isn't in it.  Another wedding, more torturing of poor Phin, and yes there is some funny in the 1/4 of the draft I've finished, but...all my thoughts are with other projects at the moment...mostly King Henry Price.  Writing BETROTHAL 2 feels like homework...I don't quite like that, so for now, consider it disappeared into the mysterious aether of my trunk.

Writer Lockdown

I've been a busy bee this year.  5 works out, all that formatting, editing, keeping betas in line, wrangling reviewers, getting Amazon to make some of my stuff free, etc.  But writing wise...not that hot.  This looks to be the least productive year I've had in three years.

I know some people can go all social butterfly and that's how they get their work noticed and done, but me...I'm much more the mad genius locked in his laboratory.  Either I'm writing or I'm doing promo, not both.  This year, promo has consumed my time.

I'm frankly sick of it.  Maybe this will cost me readers that one extra tweet would have grabbed, but I find it hard to care.  I need to do this writer-style, not marketer-style.  Even assuming I write all the way into my eighties, I don't have enough time on this Earth to get out all the material that is already in my head.  Oh to think about some of the worlds and characters we're never going to get to visit together just because I'm human and not an evil cyborg...

Alas...

So...WRITER LOCKDOWN.

I'm ripping the mouse and keyboard off this baby and throwing them into the closet, I'm taking the laptop off WiFi, I'm giving the Xbox a very stern talking to about letting me play with it so often lately, and I might even give Kathy Bates a call.

RR will not be on the net much...for December or for 2012.  If you need to contact me about a review for my books, hit up my email and expect a wait in answer.  If you just want to send fan-mail...well, I like fan-mail, only again: expect a wait.  Hopefully I'll eventually sale a million copies and have some extra cash for a assistant, and a cover artist, and a great copy editor, and a guy to walk around behind me and say "Remember the Athenians".  But for now:  expect a wait.

You should however, be happy.  This means more work coming out from me.  Probably...no promises.  But I expect an uptick in production without promo holding me down.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a geomancer to do some business with...

No More Reviews from RR

I actually really do love writing reviews, mostly to get cheap laughs with puns (YAY PUNS!), but also to defend good books and to destroy over-pushed bad books.  Being both an Indie writer and a semi-successful reviewer has been something I've gone back and forth over whether it was..."cool".

Before last weekend I could safely claim that even thought I had novels for sale, I wasn't in competition with these people.  I mean, let's be honest, I had sold a grand total of 50 books, with another 50 given out to reviewers.  That's not prime-time, that's minor leagues...maybe even tee-ball.

In no way, shape, or form, was I in competition or a peer of some of these Big 6 writers I was kneeling down before or bashing over the head with a lead-pipe.

But I'm not sure I can say that any longer.  The BETROTHAL went free and now I have six thousand copies floating around in the ether after four days...and a week or two to go before I can switch that drain off.  Sales of FOUL MOUTH have also picked up to a few copies a day.  Looking at the future I can only imagine that this is going to increase, especially with sequels coming next year (probably...no promises...back up off me!).

Maybe I'm not Major League yet, but the GM just gave me a reminder that it's coming.  So why not stop reviewing my soon-to-be peers now?  It's a good time for it.  The only book to come out for the rest of the year I was interested in having an opinion on was Ilona Andrews...and everyone already knows Andrews rules Urban Fantasy, so why do I need to say it?

It is kind of a shame...I never did break into the Amazon Top 1000 Reviewers...and I was very close.  It will just have to be one of those things I never accomplished, up there with not climbing Everest (big mountains and freezing to death are so not me) or missing out on my high school senior prom (no, not because I couldn't get a date...the girlfriend lived out of town...me, geek?  Never!).

If you're REALLY into my thoughts on the books I read, there's always Goodreads, which I'll keep updating with star ratings, if not explaining them (why did he give MY PET GOAT 5 stars?  We'll never know...).  I'll also probably casually mention books I think rock and Spec-Fic I think everyone should be reading (Kameron Hurley) in general blathering posts I make in the future.

But puns?  No...the puns are dead.  Or at least unintended (LOOPHOLE)...

Where We've Been...Where We're Going

This has been a completely whirlwind year for me.  I started out thinking:  get published.  Even though I was interested by the new Indie movement, even if I saw the artistic advantages it contained and maybe even the financial advantages it might contain in the future, I didn't jump immediately into the pool filled with under-edited and badly-covered sharks.

I think some of the reluctance came from how much time I'd been building to the whole agent/publisher hunt.  I started working on BETROTHAL in May 2008 with that goal and suddenly it was January 2011 and it would take me a few more months to accept that the publishing world had changed while I'd toiled away on my first two books.  Borders ready to die, Kindle dominate.  Big changes in the air.

January/February/March wasn't a total waste.  Lots of good ideas sprang up in that period, first as short stories and eventually as novels I'll one day write.  It also saw me hit up many literary agency and short fiction magazine in futile gestures towards a dying paradigm.  It was this process itself that cured me.  That set me on my different new road towards becoming an under-edited/badly-covered shark myself.

The tradition route of Agent--->Publisher is the most chaotic...badly-developed...system I've ever seen.  By the time I actually sent out my query letters I was praying not for success, but for rejection.  If the query letter stage was that mismanaged then the rewriting and publisher seeking probably would have caused me to go brain dead.

As those letters were browsed and thrown away across the country probably without even a minute's examination I turned to this new invention and got to work.  I can't believe how artistically freeing it turned out to be.

In the last six months I've published two novels in two completely different genres, one taking advantage of the new technology in its footnotes and the other taking advantage of not having an editor tell me how many times I can curse per page or that I'm making the main character too rough.  I've published a short story which I'm able to give away for free to thousands.  I've published a novellete, the first of a series of serial novelette/novellas that also takes advantage of the new technology.

That's a hell of a year, but I've also learned a lot more:  I've learned how to make not-so-bad covers, I've learned how to use fonts and type, I've learned how to convert ebook files, I've learned all the joys of formatting, I tweet, I blog, I review in my own take-no-prisoners style and I've figured out the whole reviewer-blogger network...which, okay, reminded me a bit of the agent thing with all the different rules for requests, but don't tell them that.

Oh...there might have been something else going on that I don't talk about any longer too.

This is the proudest year of my life...but I've got a lot of life left in me.

What does RR have in store for you over the next few years?

Tons of stuff.

First and foremost will be The King Henry Tapes.  FOUL MOUTH 2 will be finished in the next couple months and FOUL MOUTH 3 is already outlined.  Actually the whole series is outline, if not chapter by chapter, then generally the flow of all 12 books.  Expect lots of King Henry Price over the next few years.  And Ceinwyn Dale.  And some T-Bone.  Maybe a little Annie B...

I've started a sequel to THE BETROTHAL.  I don't have a firm idea on when it will be done.  I'm kind of iffy on the sequel and while there's some Funny so far in the draft I have some fears for it.  Mostly I just saw a trailer for another "American Pie" movie and I really don't want to end up doing that...  If the sequel doesn't meet my standards I'd rather scrap it than just pump something out for quick cash.

EATERS will continue.  SLIME DINNER and SETTLE DOWN are already coiling around in my screwed up little brain.  There might be more after those two, one of the fun things about writing a serial is I don't write with the future, I just let to story go where it may.

Then there's the biggy, my first...I guess I'd call it more complicated novel.  We'll just call it CHAINS for now, though the title will change by the time it's done.  You'll hear more about it in 2012, for now, my plate is very full.